Mildura Writers' Festival 2013

The Mildura Writers' Festival involves workshops, lectures, forums and discussions involving some of Australia's best writers.
ABC Mildura Swan Hill has tapped into people on the ground who are at the events and can give us a first hand account. You can find them here while the festival runs from 18 - 21 of July 2013.

Chloe Hooper, prose writer, along with Lisa Jacobson and Michelle Leggott, poets, moderated at this event by Chris Wallace Crabbe certainly engaged the relatively populous group, for a Friday, that attended this event held upstairs at the Brewery.

Maybe it should be a given that anyone who writes should read - although Chloe Hooper did quote Elle MacPherson as having said, "I never read anything that I haven't written myself."

Whatever be the case with others who "write" - at least these three indicated to what extent they read - avidly and unapologetically - to inform what they write.

All three indicated humbly that they take ideas from others, in the process of that reading.

Indeed the truism that you cannot write without reading, was borne out in the readings of their work at later events in the festival, showing how rich is the outcome of such reading.

It was particularly enlightening to witness the strength of current New Zealand poet Laureate, Michelle Leggott. She is quite open about managing the effects of the macular degenerative process that has rendered her these days almost completely without sight.

The "Q and A" part of the event showed to what extent the audience was intrigued with the question, "how does a blind reader read, let alone write?"

In my previous review I referred to "magical" components of this festival. One of these was certainly the way Michelle has overcome this potentially insurmountable hurdle, via a GPS device and her ipad.

In fact the next day as she "read" her haunting poetry with these aides, she moved members of the audience to tears - and one audience member was sensitive enough to tell her so (because otherwise she would, of course, have not known).

"A year at the Races" Friday Lunch event with Craig Sherbourne and Jane Smiley

"This festival is known for its food," I was reminded by one of the expectant writers I had met on Thursday morning early in the festival. And not to disappoint, the rich, succulent, melt-in-the-mouth, slow cooked beef cheek served at the Friday lunch, contributed perfectly to the cozy, winter-warming ambience that is such a feature of this festival.

The gem of the lunch was the way Australian writer Craig Sherbourne (who also read from his autobiographical work Hoi Polloi), engaged in conversation the Pulitzer prize-winning American guest of honour Jane Smiley.

This morning on radio I used the word "magic" to describe the whole festival. Sadly the word has recently been overused and what I meant was "magical." To my mind there were more than a couple of magical occasions over the course of the festival.

At the lunch horses were portrayed by Smiley as magical beings, as she discussed their qualities and delighted us with a reading form her recent autobiographical work, A Year at the Races.

While Craig kept testing the possibility that Jane feels horses are like humans ("are you anthropomorphising them?" he asked more than once) she insisted that conversely, the very point is that they are not like humans.

"People are alike," she said; "horses are different." She struck a rich chord with the racing-enthusiast crowd at the lunch. The nature of racing also came across as having a magical quality - particularly in its link with true superstition.

Both writers discussed the way the racing world's belief in "luck," is inextricably linked with an understanding that "there is something out there." Just as magically, the parallel both writers drew between racing and "the perfect capitalism - crooked, beautiful and inspiring," also struck a knowing chord!

Hilary Thiele

Fiction writing workshop with Craig Sherbourne by John Leary

This workshop did not have a promising beginning - Craig told us he was not a teacher, and could not imagine what would be taught in a creative writing lesson/course anyway.

Despite this he delivered an excellent session, packed with sound advice and good tips.

For example, he talked about the importance of the introduction in any work of fiction "Write something short, strong and active - something that establishes the voice of your narrator;" that was his advice.

Nothing new there of course. But he added something that was new (to me, at least): "and then write your concluding sentence/paragraph - that will confirm the voice you are using, and drive you strongly through your narrative."

He called this "loop writing" and it's something I shall try in my next attempt at a short story, as well as my writing group sessions.

He spoke about that staple of fiction-writing teachers - the principle that's referred to as "show, don't tell", the principle that a good writer reveals and demonstrates his story by the actions in which his character is involved.

Sherbourne's image for this was "use the camera of your eye to let things happen before you and your readers". Similarly he suggested that "Dialogue must be heard" and therefore we should read our dialogue out loud. Again, I thought this was sound and fresh advice.

Unusually, he suggested that you don't have to overly worry about good writing. "Write as well as you can, of course, but remember your work, if considered for publication, will be corrected and edited - that's when mistakes can be attended to."

Equally unusually he suggested a writer doesn't have to avoid clichés; "clichéd expressions and clichéd plots are a staple of life, and your editor will clean them up anyway".

He provided much more useful advice. I cannot repeat it all in the space that is allotted to me, so I shall close by congratulating him on the excellent session he presented.

John Leary got along to a presentation as part of the Mildura Writers' Festival with the editor of The Dura Harry Rekas

I bought a copy of The Dura when it was first released and read it from cover to cover. I found the content confusing - several really interesting articles, several good photographs, interspersed with lots of what the editor calls "shenanigans" but which I would call padding and sheer gumph!

My overall impression was that the editor had identified a real gap in Mildura's intellectual life and had made a brave attempt to rectify it. The magazine had promise but the promise had been obscured by lack of discipline and overall purpose.

Hence when I discovered that The Dura's editor (Harry Rekas) was listed to present a session on his magazine as part of the Writers' Festival I made sure I would attend -maybe some of my confusion would be cleared up. Unfortunately it wasn't. I came away from the session disappointed and further confused.

Rekas presented himself as an irreverent Renaissance man who is on a one man crusade to revive the magasin, a style of publication that existed in C17th Europe. He'll publish anything in The Dura, so he told us, as long as it interests him, and he read us vast slabs from edition one to demonstrate this.

People who attend Writers' Festivals expect to be exposed to a certain amount of narcissism from the presenters, but I'll bet none of those who attended this session expected the vast quantity of narcissism Rekas indulged in.

His jovial, self-satisified exposition was interrupted on two occasions by the collapse of white plastic chairs on which members of the audience were seated. I found myself wishing the couch on which Rekas was seated would follow those chairs' example - such an event might have shut him up, releasing us from our misery.

Unfortunately this did not occur. We had to sit there and endure Rekas' formless stream-of-consciousness presentation until the time for the session was up.

I'll ignore The Dura from now on. I'll continue to buy The Big Issue instead.

Hilary Thiele describes a poetry and writing workshop held by Lisa Jacobson as part of the Mildura Writers' Festival this year.

Right up until the event was to begin at 10.30 am on Friday morning, only four people were booked.

The tantalizing nature of the other two events - one of which was the fiction writing workshop - had won out against the assumed lesser accessibility of poetry writing.

Or so we thought.

Commenting that "poetry is like the blue whale - if it were gone we would miss it, but that small and intimate is a good way to go," Lisa Jacobson was about to start her workshop.

But then (perhaps they had heard her?) a continuous line of people converged through the doors.

Interestingly for a workshop such as this, the majority of these drop-ins were male. Soon eleven participants were embarking on the task of writing a poem about "milk," with parameters that were simple - Lisa defined a poem as "a piece of writing where you don't write to the end of the line."

Soon all had something in front of us to read aloud to the rest of the group. Lisa used what she heard, to then extrapolate things that are true about poetry - an invaluable stamp Lisa was able to put on the workshop.

Here are some of them:

Because "milk" is so much a part of our childhoods, Lisa encouraged us to be as childlike as we feel like being, when we embark on a poem.

She emphasised not being bogged down with "a message" too early in the process, and importantly to draft, draft and draft - something she feels she did endlessly in the writing of her novel/poem, "The Sunlit Zone."

It was a magical workshop, in which all participants went away knowing they could write poetry.

Hilary Thiele

Review of "An evening with Frank Moorhouse and Don Watson" at The Mildura Club, Thursday July 18th, (opening event of The Mildura Writers' Festival 2013).

As I drove home last night I listened to two broadcasters describing the Second Test at Lords - two men communicating their thoughts about the batsmen, bowlers, fielders, umpires etc on the oval in front of them.

Even with all those props, the broadcasters couldn't avoid passages of conversation that were dull.

This helped me appreciate what I had just experienced, for Moorhouse and Watson were not dull, their thoughtful and amusing conversation about the Australian bush and its influence on the Australian psyche provided lively entertainment that wet my appetite for the events of the Festival that are to follow.

They did this on a stage without any props, without the benefit of a moderator - nothing to work with but their own talents and intelligence.

The "Australian Bush" is a broad subject. It seemed to me Moorhouse and Watson narrowed it quite a bit - the "bush" they spoke of seemed confined to regions east of the Great Divide and south of the Tropic of Capricorn, but much of what they discussed rang true.

They spoke of the sense of melancholy bush life can produce, and its monotony, and its conservatism and prejudices.

They spoke of the stoic determination of Australian bush men, and of the heroic support their women provided.

Australian men rushing from their bush lives to fight in WW1 for Queen Victoria (even though she was a dozen or more years dead), they spoke of good Church of England boys in a bush town throwing stones at the Methodist boys because they were not Presbyterians.

These images reminded me of aspects of my youth here in the bush town that was Mildura. I suspect they had the same effect on others in the audience.

It was an interesting and thought provoking evening, not too serious, not too demanding - a very suitable aperitif for the events which are to follow.